F1fth wrote:It is also approximately 7000 lightyears away and is speculated by scientists to have been destroyed thousands of years ago by a nearby supernova. Given the distance, it will take another 1000 years we will be able to see it's possible destruction.

Note to self: Local supernova 7K light years away will hit our vicinity in about one thousand years.

While is it not a "near-Earth supernova" I would reccomend not accepting offers of imortality in order to not have to worry about the impact to the planet in a thousand years, especially if we get caught in the path of the gamma ray burst.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the center of globular cluster M 4. The power of Hubble has resolved the cluster into a multitude of glowing orbs, each a colossal nuclear furnace. M 4 is relatively close to us, lying 7200 light-years distant, making it a prime object for study. It contains several tens of thousands stars and is noteworthy in being home to many white dwarfs—the cores of ancient, dying stars whose outer layers have drifted away into space.

In July 2003, Hubble helped make the astounding discovery of a planet called PSR B1620-26 b, 2.5 times the mass of Jupiter, which is located in this cluster. Its age is estimated to be around 13 billion years—almost three times as old as the Solar System! It is also unusual in that it orbits a binary system of a white dwarf and a pulsar

Makes sense for the same reason that dark spots on the sun aren't dark at all -- they're actually more than 100x brighter than a light bulb comparatively to the rest of the sun, but our eyes auto-adjust.

On Sunday September 9, 2012 (still today for some of you), India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle PSLVC-21 lifted off, carrying two satellites from a launch pad in Sriharikota, southern India. It was the 100th mission for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The satellites consist of one French observation satellite and a Japanese microsatellite.

India’s space programme has been active since the 1960’s, launching satellites for India and other nations. The ISRO successfully sent a probe to the moon in 2008; it was the first time a probe had detected evidence of water on the lunar surface. There are plans to send a spacecraft to Mars next year.

Why can't I see stars in the "sky" in the video of Armstrong and Buzzdrin on the moon?

M not a physicist but the reason in short is it takes time for a camera to adjust to the darkness. Of you took a photo of the sky all you'd see is black unles you held it at the sky for a certain period of time.

The Pencil Nebula is also known as NGC 2736 or Herschel's Ray, after the British astronomer who discovered it in 1835, John Herschel. It is a cloud of glowing gas that is part of a huge ring of wreckage left over after a supernova explosion that took place about 11 000 years ago. The nebula is found in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sails), is about 0.75 light years across and is about 800 light years from Earth. It moves through the interstellar medium around 650,000 kilometres per hour. The brightest part of the nebula resembles a pencil, hence its name; the entire structure in this image more resembles a witch’s broom.

The remnant from the Vela supernova is an expanding shell which originated from the supernova explosion. Initially the shock wave would have been moving at millions of kilometres per hour, but its expansion through space meant it ploughed through the gas between the stars, which slowed it down considerably. The Pencil Nebula is the brightest part of this shell. The luminous appearance of the nebula comes from dense gas regions struck by the supernova shock wave.

The different colours of the nebula allow astronomers to determine the temperature of the gas. Regions which glow blue are so hot that the emission is dominated by ionised oxygen atoms. Cooler regions glow red, due to hydrogen emission.

The image was produced by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Everyone says that, but geneticists and other various scientists believe/agree that they are 20 years away from being able to control the aging process. Even being able to reverse the aging process.... Anyone under the age of 60 has a shot at living for forever. True story, google it.

Take a close look at the pixelated red spot on the lower right portion of the image above, as it might be the oldest thing humanity has ever seen. This is a galaxy from the very early days of the Universe, and the light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes. The telescopes — and the astronomers using them — had a little help from a gravitational lens effect to be able to see such a faint and distant object, which was shining way back when our Universe was just 500 million years old.

“This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” said Wei Zheng, a principal research scientist in the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who is lead author of a new paper appearing in Nature. “Future work involving this galaxy, as well as others like it that we hope to find, will allow us to study the universe’s earliest objects and how the dark ages ended.”

This ancient and distant galaxy comes from an important time in the Universe’s history — one which astronomers know little about – the early part of the epoch of reionization, when the Universe began to move from the so-called cosmic dark ages. During this period, the Universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. The discovery of the faint, small galaxy opens a window onto the deepest, most remote epochs of cosmic history.

In 1843, the southern star Eta Carinae became the second brightest star in the night sky, outshone only by Sirius (which is almost a thousand times closer to Earth). Within 20 years, Eta Carinae had ejected more mass than our Sun. By the 20th century it was invisible to the naked eye, thought it is visible on a dark night. It is a stellar system in the constellation Carina, about 7,500 to 8,000 light-years from the Sun.

Eta carinae is comprised of two stars, the larger of which is a huge and unstable star near the end of its life. What astronomers observed in 1843 seems to have been a stellar ‘near death’ experience, called supernova impostor events by scientists. The outburst from this star seems to have created the Homunculus Nebula, shown here in the composite image from the Hubble Space Telescope taken last decade. In the centre of the image is purple-tinted light which is reflected from the star Eta Carinae itself.

The star has lobes of expanding gas surrounding it; these lobes are laced with filaments of dark dust, jets bisect the lobes that emanate from the central star. Around the lobes is quickly expanding red tinted debris; captured only because it glows in a narrow band of red light. The debris includes streaming whiskers and bow shocks which were caused by collisions with existing material. The star’s high mass and volatility make it likely that it will explode in a spectacular supernova sometime in the next few million years.

Take a close look at the pixelated red spot on the lower right portion of the image above, as it might be the oldest thing humanity has ever seen. This is a galaxy from the very early days of the Universe, and the light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes. The telescopes — and the astronomers using them — had a little help from a gravitational lens effect to be able to see such a faint and distant object, which was shining way back when our Universe was just 500 million years old.

“This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” said Wei Zheng, a principal research scientist in the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who is lead author of a new paper appearing in Nature. “Future work involving this galaxy, as well as others like it that we hope to find, will allow us to study the universe’s earliest objects and how the dark ages ended.”

This ancient and distant galaxy comes from an important time in the Universe’s history — one which astronomers know little about – the early part of the epoch of reionization, when the Universe began to move from the so-called cosmic dark ages. During this period, the Universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. The discovery of the faint, small galaxy opens a window onto the deepest, most remote epochs of cosmic history.